Falling deep
by pathomythic
Summary: The powers in Beacon Hills will push some to be swallowed by darkness. Some push back and the dead come calling. S2 spoilers, zombies, TW for mentions of mental illnesses.
1. Falling deep

Did the leaves ever stop falling? Her feet sunk in the sea of them. She was perspiring, beads of sweat trickling from her temples and collarbone soaking through her coral red skirt and pearly white blouse. The brittle dead leaves stuck to her ankles itching distracting. It was a sign of growing older to find the seasons had left you behind and everything rushed around you while you were standing still.

But why did she need to move? Her life was set and it was she, she who set it. Lydia was getting a full scholarship and was going to college and her boyfriend was going with her because he was good he was the best they were both going places. Lydia didn't have to move outside the path she carved, her parents surely didn't help, except now when she had to will her leg to lift and take a step and then the other and one more.

Lydia kept walking because she never backed down. Once it had taken her three days to find her way out of the wood. The wood begun in her back yard it shed its leaves in the pool drove her mother crazy when it darkened the solar and terrace with moss. She would not let a few specimens of _Quercus garryana_ and _Fraxinus latifolia_to make her think the sun would never again rise in the east. Again. She knew that it had hid her four-year old self from her parents until their screams of "Lydia!" had turned hoarse, had hosted fire hazard parties with bonfires and weak beer and that she had learned here the simultaneous feeling of sharp bark and Jackson's fingers in the sensitive inside of her thigh. She hated it for having grown with it and that took her twice and this tiny town and being used, kept in the dark. How she only ever remembered terror like vomit in the back of her throat and the grey skeletal limbs of the trees looking beautiful and welcoming in the face of death. Still she had kept walking. And the house with its colonial brick chimney and hollow windows beyond was not death that dragged you down screaming, just a graveyard kept alive by hatred and pain.

It was just a wood-inhabited by werewolves like Scott, werewolf hunters like Allison and casualties like Stiles. Lydia could reason now that she had been possessed. The little voice that had said: "Do this little thing, and it will all get better, do it doitdoit DO IT!" and kept saying it so she'd done everything the boy's voice asked, there reason hadn't applied. Reason should have said that the cloying flower smell that never went away always clinging on her hair and skin no matter how much she had washed was a symptom of schizophrenia or brain damage or poisoning. Reason should have said she was crazy to even consider the supernatural.

When she reached the dead house and found the living werewolf there she struck him. Beat and slapped at his solid form for being there clinging to ghosts and letting the living sink. He blinked once or twice but he was unmovable a tree and his eyes were the grey of bark and just as hard.

She stopped necessarily, out of breath. "You're supposed to hate him." He had killed him once he had known the awfulness of him.

"I can't. I need him."

_Peter had smiled with wolf eyes his mind already fixed in the hunt. He had been fifteen, Derek had been six, and had just had his first full moon. All the family had gathered to celebrate. Birthdays held nothing to becoming a wolf. They were taking Peter to hunt with the pack and Derek had cried. "I promise I'll run really fast." "Sorry coz," Peter had said, "I'll save you some rack and I promise I'll run with you on your first pack hunt." He had kept his word, both times, even if Derek hadn't stayed for the party because Kate Argent had been glorious, beautiful, her skin soft where her bones had been sharp and her smile wicked and sweet-tasting._

Lydia had such large eyes and they stared back at him with a familiar helplessness. The mirror had stopped showing it to him gradually, he had learned it only asked for trouble. But anger always helped. Anger nurtured.

"You have a pack."

"Teenager betas won't do me much good. There's no one else."

"Won't do you- You're using them. You've tricked them into becoming werewolves so that you'd have a pack in your scheme to wipe out the Argents," she said and the helplessness disappeared to make way for correct insights. "You will let the Alpha pack terrorize people who can't defend themselves because Peter said they'll do you more good?"

"The Argents' plan was good and I can see that now but they messed up the execution. They left three Hales behind. I'm not going to make that mistake."

"You're threatening my best friend and her father."

There was always running; it was a drill which was familiar to him. You picked a direction and you took it fast always looking over your shoulder making sure you stayed downwind, transforming in warehouses that locked, and then after a couple of months you picked another direction, rinsed and repeated. That was what Omegas did.

"I'm Alpha. Alphas protect their territory."

She shook her head uncomprehendingly at his words. "You want blood."

"We let the blood debt fester for too long. The crime was left unpunished and the hunters have been decimating unprotected wolves since. Peter and I are going to restore the balance." The pup Laura had sent away grew up and it was his time to act. Lydia shaking her head at him still didn't understand.

"It doesn't stop even after you do what he tells you," she said and it made him bristle that she kept making this about Peter. "He wants more than you can give willingly and it will make you break something of you."

Peter had always played rough when they had been younger and Derek had learned (from him) to give as much as he took. Wolves had a hard and wiry hide and could take a few bites and scratches. What would a witch know about how much a wolf can take?

"Go back to your hut, piglet."

She turned on her heel and walked away letting the challenge unanswered.

"Don't do it, Derek," she called over her shoulder finally. It echoed a whisper half-choked on wolfsbane and panic struggling through the poison haze of that time she had raised the dead.

-


	2. Falling to pieces

Derek Hale saw Tall Red fall on the charred bones of the old Hale house. He saw them crumble under the weight of the redwood's vast trunk and the gaping wound that remained where it stood just moments ago-a wound that shone incandescent shimmering silver from the copious moonlight bouncing off of billions of specks of dust that had risen after it. The soul of the house it seemed had finally ascended to heaven, its path cleared and redwood-shaped.

The earthquake had raised Beacon Hills six more inches above sea level. The curiosity of the changing geography did not faze Peter and the greater scheme - his greater scheme - and so a week later on a moonless October night the Alpha pack attacked the Argent home as planned.

A wolf knows when something is wrong. The air smelled of black dirt heavy with iron and acrid nitrates throwing Derek's nose off. He told Peter, not how much he wanted to run, no, he asked him to drop the plan, that it was wrong, it was all wrong and couldn't he smell it too?

The truth is Peter never listened to him.

When the howling started, the screaming and the gunshots Peter stood there with him in the clearing where the acoustics of the hill's volcanic rock sharpened their already heightened hearing even if they were miles away from the heat. They listened each sound progressing, finalizing, digging deeper.

"When we win," Peter said, "We will go higher, do it all. We will take the East Coast. All the hunters, all the competition."

The earthly scents grew stronger and stronger, they came with the breeze and brought the blood along drifting softly over from the town. It was like a kick in the gut, and adrenaline triggered an instinct reaction: claws broke through. Wolf blood, bitter, laced with terror, making him hungry.

"Run!" He said it when finally there was no choice. Even alpha wolves flee. They can't fight forest fires or tsunamis or earthquakes. Only things that bleed. "Peter, we need to run."

Peter stood there frozen, refusing to look at him and staring only ahead. The smell fused with the increasing vibrations that became beats of heavy steps closing in on them. Derek Hale ran on four legs taking the path south avoiding the town and being trapped on high ground.

Still he fell on a wall of bonelessly walking corpses, eyeless grey-skinned, black with decay and missing body parts. He pushed on, a swipe of his paw sending the zombies flying off. They kept coming at him ranks unending dead weights throwing him flat on the ground, and he waited horrified to catch a glimpse of a familiar face because what is a fear of corpses but the possibility of your dead kin so appalled by the person you've become to allow your family's near extermination that they would drag you down to their hell as punishment. He shifted back to human and in that smaller form crawled out of the pile to go back for Peter.

A streak of red hair flashed over Peter's shoulder making Derek pause before revealing himself. Lydia stood in front of Peter and the way of the scene screamed that despite her smaller frame Lydia was standing, was looking, Lydia was holding Peter in that absolute stillness, everything involved Lydia_ being_. And the zombies that fell on Derek from behind and trapped him in his human form this time followed Lydia, the one who raised the dead.

No kind of movement helped him, he was caught in the inertia of the zombies who had all formed a large thick circle around Lydia (not Peter, just Lydia) and watched listlessly as she leaned in and kisses Peter softly in the mouth. She withdrew and in the small space between their mouths Peter's soul hovered for a moment suspended like an iridescent bubble. It dissipated in the night air like so much dust.

"No." The word that came out of his mouth didn't have a sound. It was drowned in the whooping fall of Peter's body.

"Go back to sleep," she said finally and one by one the walking corpses turned and left and the weight that grounded Derek lifted body by body releasing him. Their return to the earth was not marked by her shuddering.

Lydia hurt. A deep pain coming from her thighbones to the ache seeming to resonate from every individual hair root on her scalp. Her eye sockets throbbed to the rhythm of, "Over, over it's over, over." Lydia knew when her body lied to her. It was at least half a mile to walk back home and away from Peter and his open eyes fixed in his last moment in desperate denial and that worn out pain that had not left his expression for god knows how long-it would not leave him even in death. She knelt painfully.

"Go to sleep." She closed his eyelids.

"Get away from him!"

Lydia felt herself lifted to her feet and held there by the two hands digging into the meat of her arms. The new hurt made her focus on the grey eyes invading her personal space and the wildness she saw in them. She would have lain there in the dirt, curled into a ball and closed her eyes if Derek had just let her.

"You killed him. I don't have anyone else." Derek shook her.

"It's OK. Neither did I." She couldn't tell how much translated into words. A deep breath later that only marginally helped her clear her thoughts and she enunciated, "Let go of me."

He snarled mouth full of sharp teeth and caught in the middle of becoming a snout, eyes glowing red. "You can't control me. I'm one of the living."

Sleep came over her so suddenly she did not remember laughing.


	3. Falling slowly

_Lydia liked studying and more than anything knew how to study. She loved the internet with its infinite sources and didn't scorn the Beacon Hills Public Library, ever since she and Mrs. Bing reached an understanding and the quarterly stocking of the library (as well as the library's scientific journal subscription) would often include up to half of Lydia's suggestions. On the subject of necromancy everything came up short._

_She sat for dinner with her father and mother fantasizing about her dead grandparents coming through the kitchen door and each taking a chair at the table. "Honey you look too thin," her grandmother would say to her horrified mother. The perfect conversation starter. "Mom, Dad, I can raise the dead!" And then maybe if you will an age-old secret would re-emerge from oblivion. "Every seventh generation my gramps said," her grandpa would say gravelly, leaning over the table, "a gift comes to a child of the family a terrible gift, and here is the conveniently materialized old tome to help you through the uncharted waters of this permanent and challenging aspect of your life."_

_But she hadn't actually tried to raise her nearly-a-decade deceased grandfather. Her dad was constantly sullen at dinnertime since he became executive director and her mom was hopelessly trying to catch his eye and a sweet word out of his mouth. The longer it took for him to speak the more elaborate and sweeter the dessert. They made it to crêpes suzette. Her mom flambéed them right there on the dinner table and accompanied it with homemade crème fraiche ice cream. She earned an exclaimed "Holy shit!"_

_The pack had given the Argents a two week deadline to scatter and in all essence be hunted down to be picked one by one. Allison's set jaw and the downturned corners of Mr. Argent's mouth told Lydia and everyone who cared more than Allison's turned off phone did: they would go down fighting. Five alphas each carrying a beta pack were bigger than Scott's loving and mushy with altruism heart._

_Lydia practised under the cover of darkness and redwood trees on her knees with the moon's second hand light calling a freshly buried corpse back to a life as dimmed and cold in comparison as the moon is to the sun. Lydia never managed to replicate a perfect resurrection. She figured she was missing a key ingredient but living breathing Peter Hale kept leaving monkshood on her windowsill. Monkshood wasn't a soul at least and she could comfortably use it, along with moonlight silver mirrors and the names on the tombstones. After the first brief feeling of disappointment she stopped trying for true life._

_Lacking a soul the first dozen corpses crawled out of the dirt and hovered around her purposeless, vacant until she opened her eyes and screamed. In attempting to flee, Lydia realised they were copying her movements as if her cerebral cortex was directly connected to their decaying muscles. They had no voice no possible blood circulation their crude motor skills degenerated in relation to time since their death. For three nights she worked. How many zombies does it take to bring down an alpha pack and their betas? She fell asleep exhausted in the cemetery and woke with black crescents around her fingernails and the taste of dirt in her mouth. The earth was so appalled by what she was doing it shuddered and the wind sought to push her off the cliff, to break her body on sharp rocks and erase the miasma. Eventually countless of the living dead shielded her from the wind and the falling trees._

The bone deep pain of days' worth of immobility greeted Lydia when she woke up, which was just as good once she realized that any attempt at bringing her body at a vertical limit was impossible. She panicked._  
_Allison was sitting at her bedside waiting while the beeping of her heart monitor steadied and Lydia opened her eyes again. Just Allison, her face purple-and-yellow with healing bruises; the suspicion that her mother wasn't there verified. Lydia pulled her lips into a pained smile.

"Hi," Allison said, her dimples always peeking whether in sadness or pleasure.

"Are you okay, Allison? Your dad?"

"He's in the ICU," she answered soft voiced and hard eyed. "They threw him out of the first floor window. Scott's mom has helped us a lot. I only have a broken ankle and what you see but they're letting me stay. He's in a coma."

She wore her pajama pants under the hospital robe and a grey cardigan over that, a fuzzy slipper on one foot and a blue cast on the other. Bruises and cuts were scattered all over her neck, face and arms.

Allison fought monsters.

"Was he bitten?" Lydia asked the inevitable. Lydia didn't fear her parents' absence anymore, whatever kept them away had been keeping them for awhile. It was habit that no longer felt like a knot in her throat, evoking an emotional response that no longer had a name. Allison's idea of family was something else entirely, deep and steely. Lydia had sneered at it mocked it tested its strength until she had realized she didn't want to cause Allison more hurt. Finally she had given into the realization that not all families are cut from the same moth eaten cloth.

"Yes."

"Can you walk on that leg and if so would you come over here and hold my hand?"

Allison humphed and limped over, gripping her hand. Maybe Lydia understood she'd become family too. It was important to keep it expanding, if only to have someone to hold on to when other members lost to wolves and died by them. If Lydia was a Matilda, Allison figured, she was Michael Corleone on his way to the opera.

She started speaking rapidly, sharing her side of the story.

"They'd surrounded our house. We fired, we'd set up some booby traps that went off under their feet but these two made it inside the house. I shot the first the other caught me by the throat. Arrowrs don't have a good grip to push deep into flesh with bare hands, you know? Dad got him on the head before five more showed up. Scott with Boyd and Erica tried to hold the rest back. I guess they failed. We thought if we could separate them then we could—They had about fifteen betas for back up, somehow they'd skipped our patrols." She shook her head looking for words. "The zombies showed up, we tore them to pieces."

Allison found out zombies existed and Lydia learned humans would eat dirt and then later lose their memory and the ability to move their legs. It was normal Dr Navarro informed her, in cases like hers. She suffered from severe magnesium deficiency. Dr Navarro asked Lydia if she had been drinking too much water lately, scrutinized Lydia's face and the shape of her body under the hospital robe. Dr Navarro explained how normally it's something alcoholics and anorexics get. Then the doctor found out how fervently Stiles defends the people he loves and about his lack of boundaries.

Security was being called when Mrs McCall rescued Stiles. Mrs McCall remembered how handy her job was when violence was in the picture. She did not blame the supernatural - she was a grown woman from Los Angeles with a teenage son. The doctors took Lydia's fixed lab reports and bought the dysentery excuse. The Sixth Floor psych ward was instantly removed from Lydia's future.

_A/N: I'm just trying to keep writing. So whatever this is it's at least that._


	4. Softly Into place

Since Peter's resurrection Lydia had waited for —dreaded— the time when after a long silence and a quick succession of varying emotions forming across her face Allison would ask the most natural question in the world.

"So, hypothetically speaking, would it be doable for you to bring more people back from the dead? Could you bring back my mom?"

It happened on Victoria Argent's three month memorial when they were all standing around Scott's gas flame kettle grill Derek's pack notwithstanding roasting s'mores because the woods weren't safe, even for people with fangs and superhuman strength.

Five pairs of eyes nailed her in place. Everyone had loved ones they wanted back, everyone. Her grandparents had been her first option and then perhaps at least half of her ideal dinner party. But nobody had mentioned it before. She could see others often looking at her in a certain incredulous manner thinking about the silliness of the beautiful vicious little victim wielding _this kind of power_, and then dismissing it shaking their heads at her. Those so often adoring eyes had been thinking that whatever power Lydia had would expire on graduation.

The s'more at the end of her stick collapsed in on itself under the charcoal crust of it. The stick started smoking and Lydia was finally forced to blink. "No."

The one perfect word to feel like it encompassed everything. Not being possessed by anyone ever again. Not getting into situations where possession might be a conceivable possibility. Not forming forcibly or otherwise soul bonds with other people. Not for any reason, not for anyone, for anyone's mother.

Look at her now vow intact barely able to wiggle her toes, with a banana drip on one arm, Jackson ostentatiously feeding her dark chocolate nuggets on the other. And all the people –friends- in her hospital room that had come to see _her_, probably breaking a dozen rules by doing so. Scott brought roses which he might have taken from Stiles' flowergasm _and_ gave one to Allison who had locked his hand in a grip and didn't let go.

Erica brought Lydia her make-up kit and stared Jackson into leaving the bed. She helped her sit up, applied her blush and held a mirror for Lydia to put on her lipstick with a weak but thankfully steady hand. Erica braided her bed hair and she even tied an orchid over one ear (there were plenty).

The trademark red smile curled satisfied across Erica's face, dark brown eyes smiling too, her own make-up immaculately applied.

"Feeling better?" Erica asked.

"Much," Lydia asked smirking back. Erica nodded and retreated to the standardized hospital couch occupied by Boyd and Isaac, smoothly melding herself on Boyd's lap whoeffortlessly shifted to take her in.

The sudden and given the circumstances seamless inclusion of Boyd, Erica and Isaac in their—they'd decided against motley crew—scurvy lot came the story of finding her unconscious on the McCalls' lawn.

Isaac reported, laughing, what the town thought had been the zombie apocalypse. Like most of the people in the know he had horrified himself with the intensity of searching for a familiar face in the black and white rag mass of zombies - of course they had been buried in suits. He laughed because he could and because there was the candy striper with the blackest hair who had smiled at him in the elevator.

"They're saying it was a prank! Two coachloads of people from Oslo dressed as zombies for Halloween creating a riot. They're saying they've seen the coaches and people coming out."

Stiles corroborated. "Dad says there's been talk of retaliation. We may be looking at a prank war. It's like no one saw werewolves jump unnatural distances or dead grannies scratching with maggoty claws on the kitchen window or anything!"

"Or Lydia Martin being dropped off by her living dead train at the McCalls' front lawn?" Lydia shook her head to clear her anger.

"I saw you, smelled you actually," Isaac said. "The town had cleared by then and the ambulances' sirens never stopped screaming. I was looking for Derek. Sniffing."

"But I saw her, first," Scott spoke up.

Isaac nodded sheepishly. "Yeah. You jumped before I approached."

Scott had attacked her. After the hard strange night he had had, exhausted from fighting and fear, and fighting and fearing for Allison most of all he had gone home to check on his mom and let her know it was okay to come out of hiding. He had run leapt the last 20 yards smelling the trail Derek had left towards the crouching figure he'd locked on in his rage. He jumped her claws out and landed on his side painfully next to her on the last microsecond swerving to miss her. Lydia was opening a hole in the lawn. Her unique Lydia scent was blanketed under Hale werewolf, Alpha and spoiled meat—human meat. It clung in his nostrils like ash.

She'd looked at him with glassy eyes. "Do you mind," she'd said. "I'm busy."

Jackson stood up scraping the chair he had been sitting on against the wall. "I'm going to get coffee." The door swung shut behind him. If there was something Lydia knew well was the fact that Jackson didn't drink venting machine coffee.

She shook her head. "I don't remember any of that."

"Is there anything else you don't remember?" Scott asked.

"I don't know," she replied. "The doctor said I've suffered memory loss as well."

"Scott's telling the truth," Isaac said.

"Where were you?" Scott asked turning to him.

"I thought I caught Derek's scent coming from the north so I took off. Then he doubled back. I thought he'd decided not to leave so I—

" I found him over Peter Hale's body. I helped him bury it. Then he left."

"Who killed Peter?" Scott asked. Isaac shrugged. He looked sideways at Lydia.

"They both smelled of you."

"What do you mean they smelled of her," Stiles yelled in panic. "Did they hurt you?"

No way. "I don't remember." She didn't remember that day at the Hale house either or pointing the zombies towards the five Alphas and towards all the werewolves, every werewolf in Beacon Hills.

On queue her heart monitor picked up an intense pace. "I'm feeling tired," Lydia said lying back.

"We'll let you rest." Allison who had not let go of Scott's hand came over. "I'll be on the other side of the floor if you need me, OK?"

Stiles tried to kiss her hand. "No," she told him.

"Get well soon," he replied.

"I need to rest."

He was dragged outside by Scott. The three werewolves who had belonged to Derek but reverted and had fought against the Alphas stayed behind. Erica leaned down to kiss her cheek, hand against her shoulder. Isaac took her hand smiling, apologetically she thought, and Boyd who she had not talked to before placed a hand softly on her ankle.

A great jolt in her heart shook her before the stupid thing which had betrayed her already settled into place, normal, discreet. Erica gave her that smile again this time a little more open, almost unreserved.

"What was that for?" Lydia asked.

Erica shrugged. "There's this saying Derek taught us. The lone deer is always thirsty."

"I'm not a deer."

"You're not thirsty either."

-

Each day Lydia would get a visit, two counting Allison who spent lunch and afternoons with her. Allison missed one and the sun patch in Lydia's room shifted until it reddened the opposite wall and waned. Lydia heard her screaming from the other wing. It agitated her made her test the hold of her legs and beg for a wheelchair. Boyd and Erica who had come on time bearing books (how did they even know?) told her what their ears picked up. Allison's dad had recovered the nurses said, his internal injuries healing overnight so as to amaze his surgeon. He had woken up from the coma. Mrs McCall came in close to tears and confirmed it. Allison still wailed.

The End

_A/N: I forgot to mention in the previous chapter I am solely responsible for the faulty medicine, this is a work of fiction. Also I still don't know what this is. Maybe it's a first part._


End file.
